Edtech Onuii breaking barriers to private tutoring one tablet at a time

In an interview with The Korea Economic Daily, CEO of Onuii Go Yejin said she used to love contemplating a lot of random things since her elementary school years – such as why an eraser is always attached to the end of a pencil rather than the tip. 

Go decided to attend the college of engineering at Chung-Ang University based on her love of designing and creating something new, with the aim of becoming an urban engineer. 

But as urban engineering and construction take years to complete, Go began to yearn to pursue something more fast-paced.

In 2012, Go took off to Perth, Australia, at the age of 21. 

With a lot on her mind regarding her career path, Go was jonesing to explore the wider world after getting her working holiday visa. 

“The elderly lady who was the owner of the place I stayed in was over the age of 70 but still enjoyed making and selling cosmetics,” Go said. “It inspired me to do my work proactively until old age.”

After gaining worldly insight, Go returned to South Korea and got her college degree. She then entered T Academy, which is a human resource training agency for SK Planet Co., a subsidiary of SK Telecom Co. 

The goal was to get training for three months and develop an app with other trainees.

Go created an edtech app to utilize her past experience of tutoring young adults part-time while studying as a university student. 

She designed an app in which users can take photos of problems they are not familiar with and upload them on the app for college students to help them answer. 

This is how her first business item Onuii was born. 

Go founded the startup to operate Onuii in 2016 and enjoyed up to 20 million won ($13,941) in monthly sales. 

In the private tutoring sector, Onuii was not an alternative to in-person teaching but could only work to complement existing forms of teaching. 

To overcome just such a challenge, Go decided to utilize tablet computers to design online tutoring. 

The transition to tablets made it possible for teachers and students to easily share their screens. Both sides could take notes on the same document and see it in real-time. 

More stringent rules applied to selecting tutors, such as focusing on recruiting students from Seoul National University, Yonsei University, and Korea University. 

To expound its strict standard for tutors, the service was named SeolTab, a portmanteau of Seoul National University teacher and tablet. 

Existing services were only serving the role of a liaison between parents and teachers. 

“In such open platforms, both supplier and purchaser have to put in a lot of effort and time to search for the right candidates and having to do test lessons,” Go explained. 

SeolTab, in contrast, only matches parents with teachers who have been vetted by the platform. 

Students using SeolTab can borrow tablets for free.

“In-person tutoring is more expensive than learning at a private academy (hagwon) and some students feel pressure just by knowing that a stranger is visiting their homes,” Go said. “Using a tablet can solve a lot of these issues.” 

Write to Jong Woo Kim at jongwoo@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.